I am a newsletter editor and freelance writer for magazines. A digital camera seems to offer many advantages for me, but I need to know if a camera like the Olympus D-600-L or an equivalent $900 camera could replace a 35 mm for my purposes. I am most concerned with the glossy full-color magazines - would the photos be acceptable to them (assuming that the lighting, composition, etc. was good)? They do accept photos on CD from ad agencies, etc. but I'm not sure what type of camera was used or whether these were scanned or what.

Thanks in advance for any information you can provide,

Shelley Zoellick

-- Shelley Zoellick (RovinUSA@aol.com), September 10, 1998

Answers

Great question, Shelley - the answer is "it depends", or "maybe."

It will obviously depend on the magazine and their graphic standards. It also depends heavily on the size they're going to be printed at. A point & shoot digicam clearly isn't going to be usable for a 2-page spread in Architectural Digest, but up to maybe 4x5 in a typical magazine, a 1 - 1.5 megapixel camera should do fine.

A rule of thumb is 2 pixels per halftone dot, but this is probably overly conservative for most current digicams and most magazines. 1.5 pixels per dot is probably fine. What does this mean? Well, if a typical magazine is printing with a 133 line screen, that's 133 halftone dots per inch. Multiply by the 1.5 pixels/dot factor, and you find that we need about 200 image pixels per inch. Thus, a 1280 x 960 digicam would be usable to about 4.8 x 6.4 inches. Above this, the image will begin to look noticeably soft, and somewhere around 1:1, your eye will start to see the edges of pixels.

As an example of what a digicam can do in magazine printing, look for one of the recent Nikon ads in the major photo magazines - the snowy mountain scene was taken with a CoolPix 900.

Other issues involve file format - ask the magazine involved if they accept "RGB" images for publication. RGB means "red, green, blue", the colors your CRT uses to display images. Printing uses the complementary colors cyan, magenta, and black, and images have to be converted between the two color spaces before they can be printed. Other things have to happen too, like unsharp masking (sharpening), and tonal compression. - Bottom line, you definitely don't want to get into all of that, but most magazines these days will take RGB files, and let their prepress shop handle the conversion for them/you. Uncompressed TIFF files are the most widely accepted format for submitted pictures, and you can easily convert the camera JPEG formatted files to TIFFs in any image-manipulation program. I've done some writing for the Petersen's publications, and they have happily taken RGB TIFF images for use with my articles.

Hope this helps, check the Nikon ads to see the printed picture as a reference. You definitely will want a digicam at the upper end of the resolution scale - the Oly 600, Nikon CoolPix 900, Toshiba PDR-M1, Kodak DC260, etc. Good Luck!

Anyone else out there with direct experience of this?

-- Dave Etchells (web@imaging-resource.com), September 10, 1998.